Witness Evidence

[RoadRunner79]

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Where it can reasonably be shown, this may be valid.  However the question occurs to me, how often do you do this?  I also think that if you did this often without reason to your professor he may take it as questioning his integrity; and tell you where you can go fly your kite.

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He can do that, and risk me not listening to him anymore.  In a university classroom, where he distributes grades and I'm just the paying pleb, that's fine.  If he's trying to convince other scientists (or even students) of a surprising new theory, then if he says, "Trust me or piss off!" he will lose his audience very quickly.

I think that we may be talking about different things or have different images in mind.  I'm not talking about some sketchy claim with poor evidence.  I'm speaking of believing based on good testimony corroborated by others.   If you have to see to believe, then you must have a lot of time, and some very deap pockets. 

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As said before, I do believe in verifying with others, and a single claim is not very strong.  Similar to in science, where they do not make hasty generalizations based on a single test.  In your example, I would say the response is reason for suspicion (there is no way to falsify the claim).  When I hear a claim that I am skeptical about, one of the first things I do is look to see if others validate (or invalidate) the claims.

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The problem is that in the case of religion, there is a common element-- the willingness to believe in fairy tales-- which renders their credibility with regard to the existence of fairy tales in question for non-religious people.

Here's the thing-- you are confused about the difference between observations and conclusions.  If someone said, "I had an overwhelming peaceful feeling," I'd accept that as evidence.  If they said, "The spirit of Jesus descending onto my spirit, and I had an overwhelming peaceful feeling," I'd immediately disregard their "testimony" as being speculative wishy-thinking.

And this is why religious testimony fails as evidence-- it involves multiple people presenting non-sequitur conclusions rather than just stating observable fact.

I think that you are making large assumptions here about me.  I am definitely going to make a distinction between the observation and the conclusion.  And I am going to challenge the person who only gives the conclusion, without the reason for the conclusion.  I have this every now and then at work.   They tell me, that component X was bad, they replaced it and still had the problem.  I have come very close to yelling at someone, to tell me what they saw and heard, rather, than what they think is wrong with the machine.  I want their testimony, not their conclusion.

I see the same thing in discussions, where people do not want to reason through their claims, and just jump to the conclusion as well.